This hopelessness, this demeaning of humanity by the indignity of cruel death, for that great and growing number who live without a faith-connectedness today, this is compounded by a scientific knowledge that reveals that death is built into us genetically from the moment of conception.I do not believe we Christians have anything to offer the searching ones of our secularised and pluralistic society until we have faced such things squarely ourselves; and not least the fact of my own mortality, my death; but doing so, in light of what God has done with death in, and through, Jesus of Nazareth. Have I really laid hold upon death as the moment of truth and the only way through into life that is life indeed? Do I really believe in life-after-life? For all too often, you, and I also, may be on the run from death until slowly, but inevitably it overtakes us as our bodies’ age, our friends die off, and we lose control over life. Perhaps that last, above all, is the rub of death that makes us afraid. It points us sharply to an inability to control our lives. Yet that control itself, when you stop to think about it, has always been limited and, in the main, deceptive. It is one of the great myths of our human condition, for control lies not in our hands, but elsewhere. The real question is: “Where?” Is my living and my dying really in the hands of God or is it not? Often enough, we fail to discern that in the day-to-day humdrum things, we are holding on not to life, but to death; existence without meaning, running through the hourglass of time.- ‘like sand through the hour glass – so are the days of our lives’!!! And so we clutch at a deadening present, empty of God. We cling to a dead past in which he had no place. We immerse ourselves in fantasies of the future where he does not feature. We feed on disappointment, unrealised dreams, past bitterness; relationships becoming atrophied, empty, even terminal because we have been unwilling to die, so that we may grow. “You will be dead”, says George MacDonald, “as long as you refuse to die”. Why, oh my God, have I not yet died to my childishness, my infantile adult ways? Is it not the fear of what will become of me if I let go of myself, cease clutching at my place in the world; perhaps, even deep down, my own sense of my worthlessness? If I let go of me, I fear, deep down, I shall be annihilated; I shall go into oblivion. Yet the truth of Jesus is otherwise. For death is Jesus’ moment of truth for us as the only way to life. “Whoever seeks to gain their life will lose it”, he says. But “whoever loses their life for my sake, or even hates their life in this world, will keep it for eternal life”. Jesus challenges us with death and we cannot escape that challenge. If we are to grow into him, to mature, we simply cannot hold onto this or that little bit of ourselves. We must take that awesome and awful risk of faith, that huge plunge into the unknown; of letting go completely, of surrendering ourselves into the Creator’s hands with Jesus; all the way with him, as he did, till his last dying breath on the cross. Do you not know that what died on the cross was fear? Jesus embraced death. He took it into himself and he seeks to do so in you and me, to carry us through that, into his own resurrection life. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit”. It was only as Jesus himself allowed everything to be stripped away from him that he could pass through the grave into that new way of being we call resurrection. And it is because of this that you and I can truly live; because we come to celebrate a death, to show it forth – Jesus’ death – until he come. But not only his death, our own as well. We come to be united with him through death itself, expressed in the way he chose, in broken bread and outpoured wine. “This, of yours,” he says over the bread, “is my body”. “This, of yours,” he says over the cup, “is my blood. Do this.” We are in this together with Jesus – absolutely. We are in the cup; we are on the Lord’s Table with him. There is no turning back – we are heading for death!! Through that death, only that death, can life-after-life become a reality. We give him our poor little fragmented lives in exchange for his so that he can make us whole; an exchange made possible only through the process of death. All we have, all we are, united with him in his death; dying to me and mine, to become his and yours. Dying, and behold, we live; death, as it is meant to be, the forerunner of life eternal. Stephen

Death, be not proud, though some have called theeMighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe.For, those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee;From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow, As soonest our best men with thee doe goe,Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.Thou art slave to Fate, chance, kings and desperate men,And dost with poyson, warre, and sickness dwell,And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then?One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die.(Divine Poem X by John Donne – from John Donne, The Complete English Poems, Everyman’s Library